What is virtual property?

Some online resources, such as domain names, virtual items in community sites, and powerful characters in online games, are similar to physical goods in that only one person can control the resource at a time. Today, this virtual property is being bought and sold for real money by millions of people at numerous marketplaces around the world.

For example, in massively-multiplayer online games such as World of Warcraft, MapleStory and EVE Online, players are taking assets earned inside the game to marketplaces such as eBay and IGE to sell them to other players who are willing to pay real money to obtain them.

In community sites such as Habbo Hotel and Cyworld, site operators sell virtual assets directly to users who wish to enhance their online identities or give gifts to other users. There are even instant messaging programs and web forums with virtual property.

Academic attention to virtual property was first given by economist Edward Castronova, who focused on the online game EverQuest (Castronova, 2001). Legal scholar Joshua Fairfield later defined the concept of virtual property to include not only game items but all rivalrous, persistent and interconnected online resources, such as those mentioned above (Fairfield, 2005).

Today, an increasing number researchers from different countries and different disciplines are becoming interested in real-money trade of virtual property and related phenomena. Virtual Economy Research Network hosted at Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT seeks to provide an open communication forum for these researchers. The objective is to promote exchange of knowledge across cultural and geographic boundaries.

In practice, the Network consists of this website and an email discussion list. The website contains research resources such as a bibliography, as well as a co-authored blog with contributors from different parts of the world reporting on related news and research. This includes material that would not otherwise be available in the English language. Current contributors are Vili Lehdonvirta, Jun-Sok Huhh, Tuukka Lehtiniemi and Jiaping Xu.

For those who are new to the research topic, a good starting point is the essay Making sense of virtual property research.

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